#Ordinary, heart-wrenching: “I remember one time when my mom asked me to get her a bowl of Cheerios, and we ate them together” – http://bit.ly/OsFfHO

I couldn’t fit the hash-tagged words above, with the link, into 140 characters. So here’s a post for the weekend and school year ahead:

Some of the breastcancerbloggers have been posting lately on the ordinary things that contribute to our well-being. The idea is one I’ve considered previously and attribute in part to Mom-blogger and post-lymphoma person Jen Singer, who once wrote about the immeasurable value of doing laundry, or something like that.

The point is – it’s not all about the vacations in Thailand, birthdays and rock concerts. Or opera, if you’re into that. Rather, it’s the everyday stuff that fills our lives.

Before I get too Hallmarky…

This morning Lisa Fields, aka @PracticalWisdom, sent a Tweet that caught my interest. Nominally, it was on the “geography of verbs” as considered in a commencement address. I clicked. The Guilford College speaker, author Patti Digh, recalled a young family that appeared a few years back on the Oprah show.

The mom was dying, with cancer. Digh recounts:

After she died, Oprah welcomed the family back to her show and asked the kids a question: “What is one of your favorite memories of your mom?” I’m sure Oprah imagined they would talk about swimming with dolphins or one of their big adventures with her, but the little girl said very quietly, “I remember one time when my mom asked me to get her a bowl of Cheerios, and we ate them together.”

Bingo. It’s the little stuff, as Digh explains. What the child – or an adult “survivor” in the sense of one who outlives the person and remembers selectively – values may or may not match what matters most to the patient.

This is the opposite, or at least a twist in perspective, relative to what the bloggers are talking about. And it’s the same. A logical puzzle, maybe, for life.

A short note on Cutting for Stone, a novel I’ve just read by Dr. Abraham Verghese. He’s an expert clinician and professor at Stanford. The author uses rich language to detail aspects of Ethiopian history, medicine and quirks of human nature. The book’s a bit long but a page-turner, like some lives, taking a strange and sometimes unexpected course.

For today I thought I’d mention one passage that haunts me. It appears early on, when the protagonist, a man in middle age reflects on his life and why he became a physician:

My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.

The point is, a physician may be immersed in his work in a manner that he is, in effect, “addicted” to practicing medicine – a term Verghese uses later on in the book. There’s an emotional boost, or relief, some doctors glean by their daily tasks. An example he gives is a surgeon who feels better upon seeing his patient, who’d been sick, recovering nicely after an operation. This applies in other fields, including oncology.

I get this. It’s an under-discussed aspect of being a doctor, articulated well in some characters’ pathology and passion.

From an article in today’s New York Times on hiring discrimination against people who smoke:

“There is nothing unique about smoking,” said Lewis Maltby, president of the Workrights Institute, who has lobbied vigorously against the practice. “The number of things that we all do privately that have negative impact on our health is endless. If it’s not smoking, it’s beer. If it’s not beer, it’s cheeseburgers. And what about your sex life?”

I think he’s right, more or less, in a slippery-slope sort of way, seriously –